University of Michigan faculty are calling for greater transparency when it comes to employee compensation, and the public school's next leader is listening.

He wants to change the way U-M reports employee compensation, so that not just the base is reported, but supplemental pay and bonuses as well.

"Transparency is important, and I'm going to work with the provost so that when the university reports salary, unless there are legal reasons in my way, I'd like the university to report salary, supplements, bonuses, et cetera," said Mark Schlissel, who will assume U-M's presidency in July. "If we're going to report it, we might as well report it."

Mark Schlissel smiles during a press conference after being named the University of Michigan's next president by the Board of Regents on Friday, January 24, 2014 at the Michigan Union. Melanie Maxwell | The Ann Arbor News

U-M is required by state law to report base salaries of all its employees, but recently faculty have publicly asked the school to disclose all compensation.

"That would be very welcome, I think that's the right thing to do," said U-M business professor Scott Masten, who chairs U-M's faculty Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs.

The committee — whose members are elected by U-M's larger faculty governance system, the Senate Assembly — passed a resolution earlier this month calling for the university to publish full compensation data. In doing so, faculty say, U-M will increase accountability and reduce suspicions about how U-M distributes extra compensation.

So far the university hasn't taken steps to change how pay is reported, a U-M spokesman said Friday.

Discussions about supplemental pay surfaced this year in part over concerns about U-M's downsizing initiative and how administrators running it are compensated. For example, the leader of the unpopular downsizing effort, dubbed Administrative Services Transition, earned a base salary of $330,000 in 2012, and that year also received $130,000 in additional compensation, according to leaked documents published in the open letter.

Yet, for many, concerns over pay and transparency are nothing new.

"The issue of supplemental pay and its reporting has been a topic of discussion almost as long as I can remember," Masten said, adding that faculty have "for years pushed to try to get more of that information."

In the open letter released in April, authors called for U-M to make public all pay and reconsider supplemental pay practices at the school.

They used leaked documents and a Freedom of Information Act request to determine that supplemental pay — in the form of administrative differentials, salary supplements, compensation for services unrelated to appointments and added duties differentials — grew by $33 million between 2004 and 2013, reaching $46 million. The also looked at individual administrators, some of whom received bonuses in excess of $50,000 in a single academic year.

Schlissel was named U-M's next president in January, after the Board of Regents conducted an exhaustive search to replace longtime leader Mary Sue Coleman. He will begin July 1, after Coleman retires.

In an interview in his office at Brown University's campus in Providence, where he serves as provost, he said offering administrators supplemental compensation is commonplace in higher education.

"People have a base salary and they get an incentive on top of that, based on performance," Schlissel said. "The alternative would be to give them a higher base salary, but then what do you do if their performance goes down the next year? It's really hard to take away salary."

He, like other university officials, noted that faculty who take on administrative duties — such as being a department chair or leading a committee — are often recipients of supplemental pay. Many recipients are doctors, who get paid a base salary and then get compensated additionally for clinical work at U-M's hospitals and health centers.

"Some of the salaries are because of the scale and the complexity of the place," he said. "I don't want to pay people any more than it takes to be fair, to motivate them, to recruit them, to retain them. I don't want to lead the market in salaries, I want to be consistent with the market."